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33 CHAPTER 4 Economies of Blood Satan Evicted With the exclusion of the Devil as a player of any consequence—the locus of death and the enemy whom Christ came to defeat—the meaning of the saving operation changes dramatically. The two most important writers associated with this move are Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom relegate the Devil to a titular role, redeploying the power of death within new soteriological configurations. God did not need “to come down from heaven to conquer the devil,” Anselm says, “or to take action against him in order to set mankind free,” for God “did not owe the devil anything but punishment, nor did man owe him anything but retribution—to defeat in return him by whom he had been defeated.”1 The standard version of the theory that God ransoms humankind from the Devil is thus abandoned in preference to the idea that Christ offers himself a sacrifice to God in what Pelikan says “could be seen as the one supreme act of penitential satisfaction.”2 Because human sin violates God’s justice by depriving him of what he is owed, namely “the honour of his dignity”—and indeed, “there is nothing . . . God preserves more justly”—one of two alternatives obtains.3 “Consider it, then, an absolute certainty,” Anselm tells his interlocutor Boso, “that God cannot remit a sin unpunished, without satisfaction, that is, without the voluntary paying off of a debt.”4 The problem is that no sinner can satisfy this debt since he owes God perfect obedience in the first place. When we consider that he 34 Chapter 4 has, moreover, contracted a debt commensurate to the honor of the offended party—namely, an infinite one—his dire predicament appears clearly. The sinner begins in hopeless arrears so that any honor he might contrive to render God is already a matter of obligation. The death of Jesus saves, not by appeasing the wrath of God, who is impassible, but by putting God in obligation to reward a truly voluntary offering, for, being sinless, Christ was not obliged to die. This in turn shows us the need for his Incarnation, since “if no one but God can make that satisfaction and no one but man is obliged to make it, then it is necessary that a God-Man make it.”5 To illustrate voluntary action, Anselm recapitulates the same exemplary contrast of marriage to virginity which Tertullian deployed in his contradistinction of that which God allows in a spirit of indulgence and that which he prefers by a superior volition. Although a creature possesses nothing of itself, none the less, when God gives it leave to do or not to do something with his permission, he is granting it the gift of having two options, under such terms that, although one option may be better, neither is definitely demanded. . . . Moreover, if it does what is better, it has a reward, because it is giving of its own accord what is its own. For instance, although virginity is better than marriage neither is definitely demanded of a human being . . . [although] if he preserves virginity, he looks forward to a reward for the voluntary gift which he is offering to God.6 Anselm uses this example to explain how it is that “when Christ died, he gave what He did not owe.”7 Christ’s truly voluntary offering to “the honor of God” earns a compensatory reward that suffices to pay the human debt.8 In a paraphrase of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane Anselm writes, “Because the Father was unwilling for the restoration of the human race to be brought about by other means than that a man should perform an action of the magnitude of that death . . . it is as if [Christ] were saying: ‘Since you do not wish the reconciliation of the world to take place in any other way, I say that you are, in this way, willing my death. Let this will of yours come to pass—that is, let my death come to pass, so that the world may be reconciled to you.”9 Anselm therefore plainly acknowledges the grim alternatives as willed by God. Because “no one else could perform the deed,” he says, it was “as if the Father were instructing him to die.”10 This claim stands side by side with Anselm’s repudiation of the idea that “God hand[s] over an...

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